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<?php pagehead("Member meeting minutes, June 14, 2003") ?>
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<?php pagetop("Linux Counter Member Meeting Minutes<br>
Meeting of June 14, 2003, 14:00 GMT to 15:00 GMT") ?>

Present:
<ul>
<li>Harald Alvestrand, Chair</li>
<li>Evert Meulie</li>
<li>Henry White</li>
<li>Claudio Brazzale</li>
<li>Patrick Reijnen</li>
</ul>

Not present:
<ul>
<li>Sanjeev Gupta</li>
<li>Anders Lund</li>
</ul>

<h2>Agenda</h2>
<ul>
<li>Roll Call and constitution of the meeting</li>
<li>Selection of a meeting chair and secretary</li>
<li>Possible changes to the rest of the agenda</li>
<li>Election of the new board</li>
<li>Brainstorming over the Linux Counter activities of the next year. Keywords:
  <ul>
  <li>Advertising the Counter</li>
  <li>Necessary technology changes</li>
  <li>Internationalization</li>
  </ul>
<li>Any other business</li>
</ul>

<h2>Opening</h2>
Harald opens the Linux Counter Project members' meeting.<br>
<br>
Harald, Evert, Claudio, Henry and Patrick are present.<br>
<br>
Harald asks if everybody has seen the agenda proposal he mailed during the week. Claudio is just reading it. All other had seen it already.<br>
<br>
Find the <a href="transcript-2003-14-06.txt">transcript</a> here.

<h2>Selection of a meeting chair and secretary</h2>
Harald proposes Patrick to be the secretary with duty to get the minutes posted after the meeting. Patrick agrees as the chat server logging is collected at his site, so he can easily make minutes out of it.<br>
Evert proposes Harald to be the chair for this meeting. Harald agrees with this.<br>
Everybody agrees with both proposals so this meeting is having its chair and secretary.

<h2>Possible changes to the agenda</h2>
Harald asks if everybody agrees with the agenda mailed. Patrick suggests to add a point about reprogramming parts of the Liux Counter site to make it easier to maintain and translate. Harald proposes to subsume that point again during the <em>necessary technology changes</em> point.<br>
Everybody agrees with this and with the other points in the agenda.

<h2>Election of the new Board</h2>
The candidates for the board are:
<ul>
<li>Harald</li>
<li>Evert</li>
<li>Henry</li>
<li>Claudio</li>
<li>Anders</li>
<li>Patrick</li>
</ul>

Harald explains there are five member and the chair, so 6 candidates for 6 places. He nominated Patrick to be secretary who agrees with that nomination.<br>
All candidates are unanimously voted in. Harald will be chair, Patrick secretary.

<h2>Where do we go?</h2>
<h3>Advertising and registrations</h3>
Henry mentions that Patrick Volkerding with his Slackware distribution, is the only distribution supporting the Linux Counter. He proposes to send Patrick VOlkerding a 'thank you' and try to get the other distribution to do likewise. The idea is to send out a test message when the mailer is set up. It's alarming that most Linux users - even LUG members - have never heard of LC or WWWLUG. Patrick agrees with this point.<br>
Harald wonders if we can make the new pages he wrote prettier (pull up the longnames of countries, allow search for subareas) and start advertising it to the distributors.<br>
Evert mentions that the more graphs we can show distributors on their own distributions, the better it is.<br>
Patrick says he signs his posts in some Linux news groups with a link to the Linux Counter. Henry put it in the headers. Evert is going to follow this idea.<br>
Claudio proposed an example of a link to the counter some time ago. And maybe it's a good idea to make a facsimile letter for sites and organisations.<br>
Harald mentions that one thing that has a lot of talk about, is to create an RPM or .deb package that installs the registration scripts. Ofcourse it should be made easy to register yourself.<br>
<b>Off meeting note from Patrick writing the minutes:</b> I've seen quite a lot complains about the reregistering procedure too. People don't seem to like it to go to the site and login, just to keep their registration valid. Furthermore, lots of them forget their key and/or password. Some proposed to send out a mail with a link people should click on. <b>End off meeting note</b><br>
Patrick suggests a nice graphical link on personal and other webpages. Claudio says he arranged a link on the mainpage of the LUG he is secretary of.<br>
<br>
Harald wonders if we could reasonably do machine registrations by HTTP - more and more times, people complain that they can't register the machine because they don't have mail on the machine they want to register (for machine-update). When we have a script that registers the machine, we can also prompt the user for registration info too, if he's not already registered. Patrick asks how we should keep these registrations up-to-date. Harald proposed to run HTTP from cron, instead of mail. Claudio proposes to do that in the form of a package which automagically renews the registration every year. Evert mentions that such a script can be classified as spy-ware.<br>
Another point with a script is the mouseclickwindowpopupware generation. Command lines are not thought very sexy.<br>
Henry says that another question is about corporate registration since many corporations, schools, governement agencies are migrating to Linux and Open Source. <br>
Harald says, one thing we definitely need is the "group of machines" registration database.<br>
<br>
A discussion about login names instead of login keys and picking your own password follows. Patrick mentions the uniqueness of the keys. Evert replies with a "first come, first serve..." Harald says it should be ok to have logins defaulted to email address, whereas the keys make the registration unique.<br>
Henry asks if it is feasible to have a monthly or quarterly short summary of just the overall totals and include a reminder about updating?<br>
Henry also mentions that as it stands now, there are too many voids in the database to be of any interest to spammers - most people obviously are very skeptical about giving their full name, etc.<br>
Harald summarizes: so we want to have an "account info" that has the key (unchangeable), the contact email (changeable) and the login name (changeable, defaults to contact email). The last one is actually in the DB (used for maintainers), but not visible on the web pages.<br>
Harald: It's quite impressive that we have 100.000+ users that come back year after year......<br>
<br>
Evert has the idea to make the names on the board-members page clickable (photo or website) so people can see who's to "blame" for the product.<br>

<h3>Technology</h3>
Harald asks Patrick about the worries he has about site maintenance. Patrick says things should be more generic, otherwise we'll run into problems when translating the site. Especially the CGI-scripts will give problems during translation. Everything is hardcoded in English. Text (in whatever language) should be seperated from markings and scripts.<br>
Harald mentions gettext() and the gnu meesage file format as a solution for that. Patrick mentions the way it is done in the webmail package Squirrelmail.<br>
Harald supposes the other way can be to have the scripts be language-specific and use common libraries to do the actual functions. Patrick says this can introduce programming problems into the scripts since changing a script is introducing the risk of mistakes. You want to avoid that.<br>
Claudio says he resolved the internationalization problem using all php scripts and associative arrays, but this costs a lot of memory during execution.<br>
Harald concludes it's like two problems mirroring each other. Either you have one script and many languages the script can pull up (making maintenance of the languages a pain), or you have many scripts (making maintenance of the code a nightmare). Evert finds the first to sound best: the languages would have
to maintained by different people anyway... Patrick and Claudio agree. Patrick tries to find out how things are setup in Squirrelmail. He posts the results of the investigation on the translation mailing list<br>
<br>
Henry found a problem with the registration script which does not seem to work with some versions of lynx. He gets all those rejects dumped into "US". A better idea would be to require certain fields and not default to anything in those fields. It's unknown what the problem can be. Harald says he can add a line that says "Choose country" and leaves country blank if not picked.

<h3>End of meeting</h3>
As time is over, Harald thanks everybody for showing up and ends the meeting.

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